At early stage, a surgical operation such as a thoracic surgery generally leaves a large wound and causes a serious postoperative pain to patients. As modern medicine and medical instruments have been advanced, minimal invasive surgery (MIS) has become a trend of current medical treatments. Along with the development of medical imaging equipments, endoscopic surgery has become a representative of minimal invasive surgery. The endoscopic surgery not only brings a revolutionary change to medical treatments only, but also reduces the post-operation pain to patients. Even so, the endoscopic surgery still needs to create several minor wounds on a patient's body in order to let an endoscopic device enter into the patient's body for the surgical operation. Therefore, the patient still has to bear with an acute postoperative pain and requires a follow-up treatment of possible wound scars. Obviously, such surgery has an adverse impact on the quality of life of the patients.
However, many imaging systems are used for entering the natural orifices of a patient's body for different medical treatments as the medical imaging equipments have been advanced. With the limitations of surgical devices and technologies, scarless surgical operations through natural orifices are still immature. In recent years, the technology of natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery (NOTES) has been developed rapidly, and different surgical operations can be performed with an endoscope passed through a natural orifice (such as an oral cavity, a colon cavity, and a birth channel) then through an internal incision into the body. The postoperative wound is reduced significantly, and a scarless operation can be achieved without affecting the patient's appearance and, thus, NOTES has many advantages over laparoscopy and thoracoscopy. However, NOTES requires more sophisticated surgical skills and only an experienced endoscopic surgery doctor to achieve a high success rate and safety.
The concept of the natural orifice translumenal endoscopic surgery was proposed in 2004. Current literatures related to the successful experience of animal experiments include abdominal and laparoscopic explorations plus liver section surgery, ovary and partial hysterectomy, gastrojejunostomy, tubal ligation, cholecysto-jejunostomy, cholecystectomy, abdominal lymphadenectomy, hernioplasty and proctocolectomy, etc. In 2005, surgical doctors first adopted the NOTES technology on human surgery for appendectomy, and then other NOTES surgeries taken place are laparoscopic exploration and cholecystectomy.
Popular subjects of the NOTES include: how to select an endoscopic entry, prevention of a postoperative infection, sewing-up a postoperative endoscopic entry, and design of endoscopic equipments. Among them, the design and development of the endoscope are the first step of the development of NOTES. Only the best design and user-friendly surgical machinery can provide a good foundation for the surgery and, thus, it is necessary to design appropriate surgical machinery for a specific natural orifice to achieve the effects of NOTES.
In view of the aforementioned shortcomings of the prior art, the inventor of the present invention based on years of experience in the related industry to conduct extensive researches and experiments, and finally developed a NOTES device in accordance with the present invention to overcome the shortcomings of the prior art.